Some ruminations on books, statues, and canceling

As pretty much everyone now knows, Dr Seuss Enterprises recently ceased publication of six of the popular author's books because they contained mildly-racist imagery.  I'm not going to launch a lengthy explication of my own views about this, which long-time readers can probably guess anyway.  Blogger Wordifull Melanie has a post up which presents the broader issue pretty well, and Nan's Notebook hosts a discussion (now up to 70 comments) which is worthwhile.  Instead I'm going to look at a more specific related question -- how is "canceling" books or art deemed "offensive" different from removing Confederate statues?  If we reject the one act so as to preserve free expression, don't we need to reject the other?

The obvious difference is intent.  Most of the Confederate statues were put up three or four decades after the Civil War, as explicit celebration and assertion of the restoration of white supremacy and the crushing of what rights blacks had won after the end of slavery.  That is, they're willful expressions of racism, not casual or accidental depictions of it.

That doesn't get to the root of the distinction, though.  Some books are also willful expressions of racism.  As I mentioned at Melanie's post, I myself have Mein Kampf and have read it, and that book is at least as deliberately racist and hateful as a Confederate statue.  Yet no one (except those with a genuinely totalitarian mind-set) would say Mein Kampf should be banned or otherwise made unavailable.

A more useful dividing line is government endorsement of viewpoints.  Most Confederate statues are on public property or otherwise displayed in ways which imply government approval.  It's clearly intolerable for government to endorse racism -- we wouldn't accept the government publishing racist print propaganda either, even though private individuals obviously have a free-expression right to do so.

But what about a Confederate statue on private property but publicly visible?  If a private individual has the right to express and publish racist opinions, wouldn't the statue be acceptable as well?

Here, I think, we're in one of those awkward situations where a difference of degree really is decisive, and it's hard to be sure where to draw the line.  A person's right to do whatever he wants on his own property does not extend to things which unambiguously violate the rights of others -- playing loud music which disturbs neighbors, for example, or storing large quantities of explosives which would endanger neighbors if they went off.  The question is how bad the danger or nuisance factor has to be to override the individual's right to do what he wants.  That's where a hard line is difficult to draw.

It absolutely can't be offensiveness.  If a "right" to avoid being offended is recognized, any semblance of a free society vanishes, because nearly anything could be offensive to somebody, and almost all controversial expression -- the very thing the First Amendment is specifically needed to protect -- is seriously offensive to substantial numbers of people.  The fraction of the population that was sincerely offended by the gay liberation movement fifty years ago may well have been larger than the fraction offended by Confederate statues today.  And, as always with questions of censorship, don't assume that you or people like you would be the ones who get to decide what's too offensive to be allowed.  Truly robust protection for free expression must be viewpoint-neutral.  In order to protect things you say that offend your enemies, it also has to protect the things they say that offend you.

Even people who would reluctantly accept a Confederate statue on private property might well draw the line at somebody displaying a swastika flag in his front yard.  It's a symbol whose shocking nature is much more widely agreed upon.  Yet it's hard to make a serious argument that the two cases are dissimilar in any fundamental way.  And what about the crosses displayed on churches everywhere?  Aren't they just as insulting and offensive given Christianity's centuries of persecution of gays, Jews, and unbelievers?

Pornography presents an analogous problem.  On the consumption of pornography in private, I'm pretty much an anti-censorship absolutist (the exception would be photographs or video of actual rape or child molestation, not because of the offensiveness of the final product, but because violent crimes against persons would be necessary to produce it).  But I wouldn't much care to see explicit pornography on display everywhere, even though in general the re-sexualization of the public space is an important part of the de-Christianization of Western culture.  Like the swastika flag in the front yard, public displays of actual porn would create a distraction-and-disturbance problem pushing close to the same territory as the neighbor's loud music.

So there are some genuine grey areas here.  However, it's abundantly obvious that the pendulum has in fact swung way, way too far in the direction of suppression, and that some robust mockery of idiocies like pulling the Dr Seuss books is not just a right but practically a duty.


Please do watch this.  "Cancel culture" is a very real problem, and it threatens people of every political leaning.  The fact that the right wing is trying to appropriate the term does not change this.  People are getting fired, humiliated, or hounded into cringing apologies over a careless word or a figment of somebody's imagination.  We all need to stand up to this, and to support those who refuse to back down when set upon by the "woke" mob.  Because any one of us, no matter how careful we think we are, could suddenly become a target at some point.